whatever insults were thrown at the Abbe he received with a grin
complacent as Shylock's, for was he not conscious that when he liked the
pound of flesh was his own!

With a fiend's duplicity he laid his plans of ruin and death. The
Marquise, swayed to his will, received him secretly in the blue room
(whose very colour suggests a guilty intrigue), though never, upon
the oath of an Abbe, when the key was turned in the lock. A journey to
Switzerland had freed him from the haunting suspicion of the Marquis,
and at last he might compel the wife to denounce her husband as
a murderer. The terrified woman drew the indictment at the Abbe's
dictation, and when her husband returned to St. Amand he was instantly
thrust into prison. Nothing remained but to cajole the sons into an
expressed hatred of their father, and the last enormity was committed by
a masterpiece of cunning. 'Your father's one chance of escape,' argued
this villain in a cassock, 'is to be proved an inhuman ruffian.
Swear that he beat you unmercifully and you will save him from the
guillotine.' All the dupes learned their lesson with a certainty which
reflects infinite credit upon the Abbe's method of instruction.

For once in his life the Abbe had been moved by greed as well as by
villainy. His early exploits had no worse motive than the satisfaction
of an inhuman lust for cruelty and destruction. But the Marquise was
rich, and when once her husband's head were off, might not the Abbe reap
his share of the gathered harvest? The stakes were high, but the game
was worth the playing, and Rosselot played it with spirit and energy
unto the last card. His appearance in court is ever memorable, and as
his ferret eyes glinted through glass at the President, he seemed the
villain of some Middle Age Romance. His head, poised upon a lean, bony
frame, was embellished with a nose thin and sharp as the blade of a
knife; his tightly compressed lips were an indication of the rascal's
determination. 'Long as a day in Lent'--that is how a spectator
described him; and if ever a sinister nature glared through a sinister
figure, the Abbe's character was revealed before he parted his lips in
speech. Unmoved he stood and immovable; he treated the imprecations of
the Marquis with a cold disdain; as the burden of proof grew heavy on
his back, he shrugged his shoulders in weary indifference. He told his
monstrous story with a cynical contempt, which has scarce its equal in
the history o